The Null Device

The MPAA show their bizarre, fundamentalist views on intellectual property yet again, this time by sending legal nastygrams to websites using the MPAA's ratings code; i.e., if you claim that your website, photo gallery, Harry Potter fan-fiction story or whatever is G (or PG or R or whatever)-rated, you can expect a cease-and-desist notice in the mail:

"We have a right to go after people who use our trademarks without permission, big or small, whenever we find out about them," said John Feehery, executive vice president for the association. "Our ratings are not supposed to be ripped off."

Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that the association would have a point only if the fiction sites had claimed that association reviewers had rated the works. Using the ratings as a rough comparison is not a trademark infringement, she said: "It's like saying a beverage tastes like Coke."

I'm hoping that this does go to court and the MPAA get a good caning, which, if anything resembling common sense prevails, they should.

Meanwhile, if you're content with the G, PG and R ratings, you can always claim that you're using the Australian ones and not the U.S. ones; the Australian Office of Film and Literature Censorship may be Bowdlerites, but they're probably not Galambosians.

(via Techdirt) ¶ mpaa censorship galambosianism trademarks eff [no comments]

The MPAA have taken over BitTorrent pirasite hub LokiTorrent; not only that, but they have captured all site logs, which they intend to use to prosecute users of the site, and quite possibly the US$40k LokiTorrent "fighting fund", contributed to by those opposing Big Copyright's heavy-handed tactics, which may now go directly to the MPAA's war chest to fund the raids and prosecutions. This means that anyone who visited the site can possibly expect to have their equipment seized in a SWAT-style dawn raid and be given the choice between a five-figure out-of-court settlement or a much more expensive lawsuit, with the prosecution funded by the money donated by those considerate EFF-supporter types. If you've visited this site, incinerate your hard disks immediately.

And, from this discussion, it appears that it may have been the site operator's plan all along to collect the "defense fund" for a plea bargain and sell out his subscribers (all conveniently identifiable by login information; no idea whether credit card information is included, though if donors' card/PayPal information can be connected to accounts, it could be nasty).

¶ mpaa lokitorrent betrayal [3 comments]

For each US$100 donated to the EFF, Public Knowledge or IPac, copyright-reform advocacy group Downhill Battle will send one lump of coal to the RIAA and MPAA.

¶ copyfight eff riaa mpaa downhill battle [no comments]